Great British Entrepreneurs

“Maybe it is the turn of the entrepreneur. We have had celebrity chefs and celebrity footballers now with the likes of Richard Branson, Alan sugar etcetera… we have celebrity entrepreneurs, and that inspires others to be like them,” says Stephen Fear, the man behind the Fear Group, a company with a turnover in excess of […]

“There is a lot of luck, you need a team, listen to advice but don’t always follow it.” Paul Lees, founder and one time CEO of Powwownow, the leading free conference call company, and judge at the NatWest Great British Entrepreneur Awards, has been talking to Fresh Business Thinking. Find out what a man with […]

“Beware,” says Evadney Campbell, MBE and judge at the NatWest Great British Entrepreneur Awards, when you set up a business “You are going to have to work harder than you have ever worked before.” But then I am passionate about what I do, it doesn’t feel like a chore, it is amazing, it is rewarding, […]

“Entrepreneurs need to be fearless, but not like a Viking warrior,” says Joel Blake, OBE for Services to Business Support and Enterprise, speaker at TED, and a judge at the NatWest Great British Entrepreneur Awards.

“They are not quite like Mother Theresa of Calcutta” says Simon Biltcliffe, a judge at the NatWest Great British Entrepreneur Awards, describing most of the entrepreneurs he knows, “but neither are they anything like the media portrayals of the Philip Greens or Mike Ashleys. Nine out of ten of the people I know who run […]

She was just 28, when the letter came. Justice Williams, a judge at the NatWest Great British Entrepreneur Awards, had spoken in the House of Commons, and when she saw the envelope and realised it was from the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, she assumed it was related to that. It wasn’t, she discovered that […]

“When I first became an entrepreneur, I think a lot of my friends felt sorry for me,” says Ian Merricks. “Poor Ian, he can’t get a job, he is having to go self-employed.” Not that they are feeling sorry for him now. Ian is the Managing Partner of White Horse Capital, which is an investment […]

You need enthusiasm, bundles of it, to set up a business, says Neeta Patel, the CEO of the New Entrepreneurs Foundation (NEF). She has this advice to any budding entrepreneur, the same advice she gives to members of the foundation, and that’s: “Don’t do it unless you are passionate about it”. But then she also […]

“You must be supremely confident in yourself, your ability and your business, but that shouldn’t be to your detriment. Ego is the enemy,” says Jodie Cook, a judge for the Creative Industries Entrepreneur Awards category within the NatWest Great British Entrepreneur Awards.

It’s EJ Packe’s business to work with high growth entrepreneurs, and she knows a thing or two about them – what it takes to be an entrepreneurial success, and how the UK can become more entrepreneurial. But to tell the tale, we need to start with heroes and crooks.